Article Knowledgebase

We're intelligent creatures. We know the basics for using our iMacs, and we can most definitely figure out how to eject a disk. If you're old-school Mac, you know you can drag the icon to the trash can, although that often instills momentary fear thinking, "I don't want to destroy that!" Then there are the basic options of clicking the little eject button beside the disk name in Finder, or right clicking on the icon and selecting "Eject". And for those of us that never even thought to look, the full-size keyboard for the iMac comes with an eject button in the upper right above the Delete key.

But like I mentioned, we're all intelligent creatures, and you didn't need me to point those out. Besides, you can find other solutions on Google. The one problem is they almost all rely on your iMac recognizing the DVD in the first place. What do you do when your iMac is being stubborn and won't recognize the DVD, and won't eject it either? You can reboot your system holding down the mouse button, but most of us don't really want to reboot. Here's a handy little one I just found. Open up Terminal (it's found in the Utilities folder in your Applications), then enter "drutil eject". Happy iMac-ing...

A couple of years ago I developed a private library for housing scientific parameters, with the goal of sharing information and facilitating peer review of said parameters. It was a very detailed application with extensive regulations on what information was entered, how it was entered, and who was allowed access to view, edit or comment on each individual parameter. The part I found most intriguing was how they intended to use it for facilitating peer review. The goal was to make this the go-to source for parameters in this particular field, for scientists around the globe to share their data, and to review each other's research. Being married to a scientist but not one myself, I could only grasp at the implications, but it seemed pretty radical to me, and therefor exciting.

Unfortunately, that project is a closed project, so no one can see or evaluate it. However, for the first time today I just stumbled across another site with similar goals. The PLoS ONE online journal exists for the same reasons, although they target a much broader audience (all types of scientists), with limited requirements for data format and no restrictions on access. Fascinating!

http://bit.ly/nhtcy5

If you sell products on your site, you need to be aware of how important those photos are, they can make or break the sale. This article has good information about how to improve your photos for little cost, and suggestions for what works well when incorporating video.

• 5 Tips for Improving Product Photos and Video on Your Ecommerce Site

 Facebook is better used as a customer-loyalty program, not a customer acquisition program. Some interesting facts:

• 84% of a typical brand's Facebook fans are existing customers
• Only 117 brands have over 1,000,000 fans
• Visits to an average website of a Fortune 100 company is down 23% from last year
• Facebook fan counts of major brands are 10 to 100 times higher than their websites' monthly unique visitor counts
• 52% of US Americans have Facebook accounts (even my dad!), 11% have Twitter accounts, and only 4% have geo-location accounts

What does this mean? Facebook needs to be an integral part of your online marketing plan, targeted at maintaining loyalty with your fans. Stay in touch with the people you know, get their feedback, reward them, but don't plan on Facebook getting you lots of new customers. Some, yes, but it's more useful at keeping the ones you have and increasing their loyalty.

http://adage.com/article/digital/brands-facebook-a-loyalty-program/229561/